When the writer James Lasdun spurned the advances of a former student, she embarked
on a vicious online campaign to destroy his reputation. He explains why he
chose to describe the ordeal in a book.

In December 2005 the poet and writer James Lasdunwas leading a quiet, bookish, life in the mountains of upstate New York. Happily married with two young children, he was working on a screen adaptation of his wife’s novel, digging in his vegetable garden, and he had just finished teaching for the year at a college in New York City.

Out of the blue he received an email from a former student, an Iranian-American woman who had taken his fiction-writing class two years previously. We’ll call her Nasreen.

They started corresponding about the novel she was writing, and then in an amicable way about each other’s lives. At a certain point, he realised that she was flirting with him, and he tried gently to discourage it. Instead, her emails became smitten, obsessive, harrying. Lasdun stopped answering them, and she unleashed an online hate campaign so deranged and relentless that even now, having written a superb book about the whole experience, he still can’t find a satisfactory way to explain it.

He sits in a Manhattan coffee shop, a Jewish Englishman in his middle years, the son of the architect Sir Denys Lasdun, who designed the National Theatre in London. James Lasdun has lived in the US since the mid-1980s and married an American, Pia Davis, a writer who used to work in publishing.

He gives every indication of being a kind, sensitive, decent man who has been through a terrible ordeal, and a haunted look comes into his face as he starts to describe it. 'I really did feel myself being acted on by demons and curses and things from phantasmagorical literature, not that I believe in any of that stuff literally,’ he says. 'She was just so unbelievably hateful for so many years, and always coming up with new ways to torment me. Try as I did, I couldn’t not think about it, and that was very disturbing, to have no control over your thoughts. It was like she had cast a spell over me.’

Over the years, Nasreen has sent him hundreds of taunting, ranting, malicious emails. She has threatened to murder him and his children. (His son was seven when her campaign began, and his daughter was 10.)

She has emailed his employers at various colleges and universities, and told them that Lasdun had sex with female students when she was in his class, and may have been involved in her rape. There is not a shred of evidence behind these incendiary charges. She also claims that he stole her writing and sold it to fellow Jewish publishers and writers who reaped the profits. As crazy as she often sounds, she is savvy and skilful in what Lasdun calls the 'asymmetrical warfare’ of a modern internet smear campaign, and she has found ways to impersonate his online identity, posting comments and forwarding emails that appear to have been written by Lasdun.

'It’s just so hard to fathom her motivation,’ he says. 'What does she get out of it? I can understand people doing harm to other people in order to get something, but she’s not getting anything. Is she just insane? Maybe, but I don’t think so. When I taught her, she seemed a little highly strung but unless I’m a truly terrible judge of people, which I don’t think I am, she was a sane person who’d got herself into graduate school and was functioning well there.’

At the beginning of the book – which takes its title, Give Me Everything You Have, from a recurring demand in her emails – Lasdun describes his first impressions of Nasreen: 'in her thirties, quiet and reserved… shy perhaps, or aloof, or a bit of both.’ She wore expensively faded jeans and a brown waist-length jacket, with her dark hair pinned up. 'Her face,’ he writes, 'fine-boned, with delicately interlocking features, had the same sallow complexion as my own.’

For her first assignment Nasreen turned in the opening chapter of a novel set in Tehran during the last days of the Shah. Reading it, Lasdun knew immediately that she was a natural-born writer. 'Her language was clear and vigorous, with a distinct fiery expressiveness in the more dramatic passages that made it a positive pleasure to read,’ he writes. 'I was extremely impressed.’

As her thesis adviser, he met her several times in his office at the college. There was no sexual tension at all, he says. She was self-contained, slightly absent, and mentioned that she had a fiancé. After she began emailing him about her novel, two years later, he saw her one more time. They met in a cafe in New York so she could give him the manuscript. She seemed frail, he thought, possibly a little stressed, but there was no hint of madness.

Although he started reading the manuscript with his usual low expectations, he says, 'The writing was as good as I remembered it.’ He emailed his praise to Nasreen, and attached a copy of an email that he had sent to his agent, recommending the book. The agent invited Nasreen for a meeting, and put her in touch with a freelance editor to help her finish the book and iron out a few kinks.

That was when her emails to Lasdun started to gush and pine, when she started to address him as 'Sir’ and 'Mr Thunder’, to detail her visits to the lingerie shop. Lasdun had to spell out that he was happily married and not interested in having an affair. Nasreen was undeterred. All through 2006 her emails came in an unstoppable, amorous torrent. Lasdun didn’t make a conscious decision to break off the correspondence. He told himself that he would reply once she had calmed down a little, and he felt less harried. But neither of these things happened.

In February 2007 Lasdun went to France with his family to research a guidebook called Walking and Eating in Provence, a follow-up to his earlier Walking and Eating in Tuscany and Umbria, which had been a modest success. Lasdun has won awards and critical plaudits for his poetry, fiction and screenplays, and he also publishes essays, reviews, journalism and these occasional guidebooks, which he co-writes with his wife. Internet connections were hard to find in rural Provence, and whenever he checked his email there were always 30 or 40 messages from Nasreen, which he left unanswered. Some of them were resentful of his silence, but not yet hateful. It wasn’t until the summer of 2007, when he was back home with his family in upstate New York, that she became hostile, and it happened overnight.

'There was a week in which she was sending slightly weird emails,’ he says. 'I was thinking: not good. But they weren’t hate mail. They weren’t insane. And then, on the same night as one of those, she just turned. I think she decided, “He’s not going to write back. I’m going to unleash the fury.”’

The first one was headed 'a coward would not read this’, and went on as follows: 'and you’re probably not reading it or you are because you’re hoping to cull some material. well, **** you… you’re unethical, an “irresponsible hippy”. And stop all your rationalizing about feeding the family and all bullshit. You had no integrity with me and you’re using a God given talent to say nothing. And I don’t want to hear about your family because your kids have a future of being thought of as Nazi Germans.’

She sent two further emails that night, warming to what would become a dominant theme of her campaign: 'how ****ing crazy Jews are these days: It’s ****ing TRUE. Stupid and crazy. I can’t say that but hundreds of thousands of Arabs can die in silence? I don’t ****ing think so, sir…’

Ilustration by DARREN HOPES

The next morning, she mocked the Holocaust, and accused him of stealing her work and using the college as his brothel. Later that day, she launched another big theme in what Lasdun describes as the 'great fugue of hatred and malice that thundered over my life for the next several years’. This was the emptiness, stupidity and vileness of his writing. She attacked his novel The Horned Man, a psychological thriller about a professor of gender studies, in these terms: 'What is the bottom line of horned man? that men should **** everything in sight so they don’t become underground psycho killers?’

Lasdun’s main reaction was puzzlement. 'I basically thought, well, she’s gone a bit nuts. It’ll probably end soon and she’ll regret it and be embarrassed.’ Instead she broadened her attack, sending emails to Lasdun’s agent and the freelance editor the agent had recommended. 'I say if I can’t write my book and get emotionally and verbally raped by James Lasdun, a Jew disguising himself as an English-American, well then, the Holocaust Industry Books should all be banned as should the films.’

Seeing the word 'rape’ by his name, Lasdun felt 'splashed with acid’, but he was simply taken aback by the anti-Semitism. 'For me personally, it has been the least disturbing aspect of the whole thing. An anti-Semitic insult, I think it’s just stupid,’ he says. 'But there’s a larger context to it, and it really focused my mind on the Middle East, and the rising tide of anti-Israel sentiment, particularly in Europe. At what point does that shade into anti-Semitism? I don’t think there’s an easy answer, but when I got the idea of writing the book, it was a question I wanted to explore.’

Lasdun’s main motivation in writing the book was self-defence. It was a way to feel less helpless in the face of her campaign to destroy his reputation and ruin his life. Nasreen sent an email advising him to check the customer reviews of his novel Seven Lies on Amazon. He logged on warily, and under the byline 'a former student of lasdun’ he saw these phrases swimming before his eyes: '… my work was stolen… after I told him I was raped while trying to finish my novel… he used my writing in that story… I think he may have a penchant for sadism…’

She posted similar remarks in the comments section on a British national newspaper website next to a piece of journalism he had written. As soon as he reported these slanders, and got them removed, they would pop up somewhere else.

Lasdun describes himself as an anxious pessimist. His natural response to bad things is to extrapolate them to their worst possible conclusion. Counter­balancing this tendency is his wife. 'She doesn’t brood or worry the way I do,’ he says. 'Her reaction to the ordeal has been pretty steady throughout – calm, concerned and sympathetic. It was some time before she took Nasreen’s craziness as seriously as I did, and even then she didn’t let it get under her skin, which was very helpful to me.’

After three years of abuse, Nasreen was showing no signs of stopping. He couldn’t help admiring her vitality, even as it was crushing him, and he felt increasingly desperate to defend himself. 'Initially I wanted to create a document explaining what was going on, and put it on my website where employers and readers could see it,’ he says. 'But I found it very hard to write a document that didn’t seem like I was crazy. I had experienced the same thing when I went to the FBI. When I told them the story they thought I was nuts, and didn’t take it seriously.’

His tormentor had created a kind of swirling online weather system of smears, insinuations and madness that was extraordinarily difficult to defend against. When you link a male college professor’s name with accusations of rape, sexual exploitation of female students, discrimination against Muslim minorities, plagiarism and theft of intellectual property, when you label his writing as sexist and racist, even if you then spiral out into wild anti-Semitic raving, the damage has already been done. Most people reading it will assume there must be some nasty little fire to create so much noxious smoke. And if you deny everything thoroughly and in detail, it makes you sound crazy.

Lasdun gave up trying to write the document, and started writing the book instead. 'Partly it was a pragmatic thing. I couldn’t write about anything else. I couldn’t think about anything else. I would try to write other stories and they kept turning into this story.’ He was nervous about what Nasreen’s response might be, and there were legal and ethical concerns too. Now he really would be taking her words and using them to his advantage and financial gain. 'It’s an irony I point out in the book,’ he says, 'but I felt totally justified in writing about someone who’d set out deliberately to destroy me, and by the same token I felt justified in using the emails, since they were her weapons.’

The book’s subtitle is On Being Stalked. Lasdun uses his ordeal as a springboard to look at similar stories in literature and mythology, to examine anti-Semitism and smearing in a broader sense, and to assess the growing importance of one’s reputation in the internet age.

'For a long period of history, you were what people said about you, and if your reputation was stained, you were in very serious trouble,’ he says. 'People fought duels over this. Then it fades away historically. People became less dependent on what people said about them. You were judged more on your own terms. Now, with the internet, it’s coming back. You have a new ability to enhance your reputation, or be enhanced by other people, and equally to be diminished and distorted and defamed. We’re seeing more and more cyber-bullying and online smear campaigns. Kids are already killing themselves over this, and I think it will come to some sort of crisis.’

Throughout the book, and the whole experience, Lasdun has bent over backwards to understand and sympathise with Nasreen, rather than judge or denounce her. A native New Yorker in his position, one imagines, might have tried to file harassment lawsuits against her, or get her committed, and in some ways his response has been very English. It took him a long time to realise that she wasn’t going to be embarrassed by her actions, and he is still puzzled that someone would behave so unreasonably for such a long time. In minute detail, he has examined his own actions and inner motivations, searching for ways in which he might have provoked her and brought the whole ordeal down on himself.

'Looking back, I realise that the silence I fell into was probably very hurtful to her, even though it felt absolutely necessary from my point of view,’ he says. 'But if I’d carried on answering her emails I really don’t think it would have made any difference. I suppose my biggest regret is that I answered her email in the first place. If I’d been living the city life, instead of an isolated life in the country, I might have just been too busy.’

At this point, more than anything, he just wants it to end. Lately Nasreen has been calling his house and ranting into his answering machine. 'I had the machine on silent but I had to listen to some of it to record it for the police,’ he says. 'She left 30 or 40 messages and it was just so very mad. Her voice is terrifying, nothing like the voice I remember. And hearing threats against you and your children, and explosions of hate, is incredibly disturbing. She’s also been terrorising two women, one in her 60s, the other in her 70s, who are part of my alleged Jewish publishing cabal. If she was doing this to a celebrity, I have no doubt that she’d be behind bars now.’

Nasreen lives in Los Angeles, where she has been visited and warned several times by the police. But the Los Angeles Police Department doesn’t want to arrest her because the crime scene is in New York, where they don’t have jurisdiction. The FBI can’t arrest her for a federal hate crime unless there are credible death threats specifically linked to Lasdun’s Jewishness, and so far nothing she has done has quite met those criteria.

Now Lasdun and the two women are talking to a detective from the hate crimes unit at the New York Police Department. 'He’s been very good,’ Lasdun says. 'He’s taken us seriously, he’s amassed all the evidence in a very professional way, but he still hasn’t been able to arrest her and extradite her from California to stand trial. And if she was extradited to New York, she wouldn’t be locked up. She’d be loose in the city until the trial, and that idea really frightens the two women. So again we’re at an impasse and it’s frustrating. It’s not that I want her punished. I just want her to stop.’

Surprisingly, he hasn’t had any response from Nasreen about Give Me Everything You Have. Its publication is imminent and there are plenty of advance reviews on the internet. Already it’s being called a true crime classic. 'I can’t imagine that she would be laidback about it,’ she says. 'Except it’s not an attack on her in any way. I don’t vilify her. I tell it straight and I think her words condemn her, but I think some people will also feel compassion for her. In some ways it might make her feel better.’ He sees the doubtful expression on my face. 'OK,’ he says. 'Probably not. I can’t say that I’m looking forward to her reaction. But she’s already threatened to murder me and my child­ren. How much worse can it get?’